Firefly, Angel: Gina Torres Recalls Cancelled Series

by Cindy McLennan, January 28, 2016

Cancelled too soon — fans still mourn Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Angel TV series. Actress Gina Torres who starred in Firefly, its sequel film, Serenity, and in the fourth of Angel‘s five seasons, still holds a special place in her heart for both shows.

During an interview about her current role on the USA NetworkSuits TV series, TV Line asked Torres to look back on her career, thus far.

The short-lived space western, Joss Whedon’s follow-up to the highly successful Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, “was a lesson in that there are no givens,” Torres says. Still, the cast — which included a pre-Castle Nathan Fillion — was “happy to come to work, see each other every day, do this and inhabit this world, and it showed,” she adds. “The idea of it was fantastic. I really do think we were ahead of our time. Unfortunately… Fox just didn’t get it, and they buried us. They can take full responsibility for that.”

Though as the ship’s first mate, Torres’ Zoë had her share of larger-than-life moments — “Coming out of the fog and a sand storm with a shotgun with Mal saying, ‘What does that make us, Zoe?’ ‘Big damn heroes.’ It doesn’t get better than that!” — but the actress is fond of the “sweet” exchanges between her and Alan Tudyk, who played her husband, Wash. “I so appreciate that the writers would let Zoe really be a girl and a woman and a wife,” she recalls. “That made her the ultimate chick, because she was a fully realized person. That’s what I mourn most, given the early demise of the show.”

And on Angel:

Next, Torres played a completely different type of character: Jasmine, the smiling-yet-sinister entity that possessed and birthed itself through Cordelia, then brainwashed Los Angeles until everyone was under her sweet spell. “She wanted love. Is that so wrong?” Torres asks, cracking herself up. “I think the scariest monsters are the quiet ones, the ones that are sitting in front of you and are very seductive. I put my voice into that honey place… There was just this calm grace about her delicious evilness. I love Jasmine for that.”